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February 2022

Canadian Convoy Movement Goes Global- Next Stop U.S.?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/03/canadian-convoy-movement-goes-global-next-stop-u-s/

While the big U.S. media mostly pretend Canada’s convoy of truckers disgusted with COVID lockdown culture doesn’t exist, it does. It’s a potent movement that has tapped into a deep vein of cultural anger and resentment over the Canadian government’s authoritarian response to the virus. And guess what? It’s coming here, and soon.

As we’ve discovered again in recent years, the left loves civil disobedience, until it’s someone disobeying them. Then it becomes filled with authoritarian busybodies, more than happy to deny you your rights to enforce their vision of the world – whether it’s COVID lockdowns used to force Americans to follow senseless, unscientific rules, racist America-hating Critical Race Theory forced on school kids, or insane “woke” cancel culture imposed on us all.

But some are now saying, “enough,” and loudly. And they’re not the elites. They’re working people who have seen their livelihoods damaged or destroyed, lost their rights to travel and and speak out, and in general have been treated as subjects, not citizens.

That’s where Canada’s trucker convoy comes in.

When Artists Become the Censors The new moral majority comes for Joe Rogan. Winston Marshall

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-artists-become-the-censors?token=ey

In 1984, of all years, rock bands in the Soviet Union were in a panic. The Ministry of Culture had decreed that, for these groups to keep performing and touring in the USSR, they would have to show that 80 percent of the songs in their live sets were not their own, but written by someone from the state-sanctioned Union of Composers.  

This crackdown was part of a Kremlin campaign to push back against what it viewed as the dangers of rock n’ roll—a Western concoction that turned young people against adults and made otherwise normal, law-abiding citizens question authority. 

The Soviet Union is long gone, but the impulse hasn’t died: More recently, Vladimir Putin’s subordinates smeared Viktor Tsoi, the Bob Dylan of the Soviet Union, claiming that Tsoi’s lyrics had been written by Americans seeking to destroy the Motherland. (For the full history of rock music in the Soviet Union read “BACK in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia,” by Artemy Troitsky. It wasn’t long before Troitsky himself, a Muscovite rock critic, found himself banned like the blacklisted musicians he was writing about.) 

‘Amnesty’ for Whoopi Goldberg By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-695438

Stupidity and evil aren’t mutually exclusive but they’re not synonymous and shouldn’t be treated as such. Nevertheless, people’s penchant for equating or confusing the two is rampant.

The almost symmetrical reaction this week to Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust comments and Amnesty International’s report on “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians” is a perfect case in point. 

Though both public expressions of antisemitism deserve reproach, they have little in common other than the peculiar shock that each elicited.

LET’S START with the brouhaha surrounding The View cohost’s asinine description of the Nazi genocide, which she voiced on Monday’s show. Goldberg uttered her now-infamous remarks during a discussion on a Tennessee school board’s decision to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, from the eighth-grade curriculum.

The book recounts author/cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s parents’ experience as survivors of the German atrocity. The debate was supposed to focus on the justification, or lack thereof, for cutting it from the McMinn County language-arts syllabus.

The reason cited for the ban was the “rough, objectionable language” of the work, which also contains a drawing of a naked woman.

Instead of sticking to the issue of free speech and whether the above should warrant censorship in this context, Goldberg said she was surprised that it was nudity and not the Holocaust itself that bothered the educators. 

The British Medical Journal Story That Exposed Politicized “Fact-Checking” The fact-checkers who flagged Paul Thacker’s British Medical Journal article about a Pfizer subcontractor for Facebook admitted they police narrative, not fact Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-british-medical-journal-story

In February of 2010, the New York Times released a front page story entitled, “Research Ties Diabetes Drug to Heart Woes.” The lede read:

Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.

The Times piece quoted an internal F.D.A. report that said the GlaxoSmithKline diabetes drug Avandia, also known as Rosiglitazone, was “linked” to 304 deaths in 2009, adding the conclusion of the two doctors who authored the report: “Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market.” The story was released in advance of a Senate Finance Committee study that produced a series of damning internal documents, including one in which an FDA safety officer expressed concern that Avandia presented such serious cardiovascular risks that “the safety of the study itself cannot be assured, and is not acceptable.”

One of the chief investigators on that study was Paul Thacker, at the time a committee aide under Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley. Multi-year document hauls like the Avandia report were Thacker’s stock in trade. I first met him around then because his committee frequently dealt with financial crisis issues I covered. Thacker, who went on to contribute to a number of commercial and academic journals, was trained in a tradition of bipartisan committee reporting that relies heavily on documents and on-the-record testimony, i.e. the indisputable stuff both sides are comfortable backing.

Kids Full of Life, Adults Obsessed with Death The insanity of masking children—by the numbers Jeffrey H. Anderson

https://www.city-journal.org/school-mask-mandates-are-unnecessary

Children are perhaps the most-masked people in America, and clearly the people least needing to be masked. Whether or not one believes that masks work—and the best available scientific research suggests, as I have detailed in City Journal, that surgical and cloth masks provide little to no benefit in stopping the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive—kids are plainly the least likely to be struck ill by Covid and probably the least likely to spread it.

There’s an extraordinary difference—even greater than widely recognized—between Covid-19’s effects on kids and its effects on adults, as fatality numbers show. Far from regarding this important fact as a godsend for the upcoming generation, however, many policymakers have treated it as an irrelevancy. At the same time, they have ignored that children living in mask-mandate states have had essentially identical Covid fatality rates as kids living in mask-free states.

Biden Should Be Ashamed of His Treatment of the UAE by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18201/biden-uae-treatment

“After the terrorist designation was lifted, it is clear the Houthis believed they could resume their terrorist operations because no one was prepared to stop them.” — A senior Gulf security official, to the author, January 2022.

Emirati leaders have publicly called on US President Joe Biden to reimpose Washington’s terrorist designation against the Houthis, a move Gulf officials say would ultimately disrupt Iranian attempts to supply the rebels with sophisticated weaponry.

In addition, Washington should also pay heed to the Emiratis’ request, and that of other oil-rich potential targets in the Gulf, for enhanced defence capabilities to counter the Houthi threat.

At the very least, therefore, the Biden administration should make amends for its ill-conceived decision to lift the terrorist designation against the Houthis, and provide the Emiratis with the sophisticated weaponry they require to defend themselves against the deadly threat posed by the Iranian-backed rebels.

The continuing escalation by Iran and the Houthis is — as most likely is their intent — threatening to destabilise the region. If they are not stopped, and quickly, the Biden legacy, along with its catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, will consist of appeasing and emboldening groups that draw on terrorism — for instance the Houthis, the Palestinians and possibly the Taliban — as well as hostile regimes, including Russia, China and Iran.

The Biden administration should hang its head in shame over its February 2021 decision to lift the terrorist designation imposed on Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, in the wake of the deadly attacks launched last month against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of Washington’s key allies in the Gulf.

Russian Appeasement Was a Left-Wing Monopoly Forgotten in the Left’s hypocrisy on Russia is the terrible damage done to American security, institutions, and the lives of innocents.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/02/russian-appeasement-was-a-left-wing-monopoly/

One way of understanding the 2009-2014 Obama Administration policy of “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia is to recall two iconic incidents. 

The first was the 2009 “reset.” 

Newly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that she would pursue a “reset” détente with Russia. America would relax the prior Bush Administration’s mild ostracism of Russia after its 2008 invasion of Georgia and softly start anew. 

The second was President Barack Obama’s hot mic moment in March 2012 in Seoul, South Korea. Obama got caught asking Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to reassure Vladimir Putin. 

Or as Obama put it: “After my election I have more flexibility . . . On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space . . . This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Both Obama and Putin apparently got their quid pro quo wishes.

Obama was reelected in 2012. The United States was abandoning missile defense in Eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin gave space and so did not invade Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea—until 2014.

During this 2009-2014 reset, a confused United States invited Russia back into the Middle East after a nearly 40-year hiatus. It refused to provide a beleaguered Ukraine with offensive weapons. 

NATO members increasingly ignored their promised military contributions. The United States cut defense spending. 

Obama discouraged domestic gas and oil production. The world price of oil soared, enriching Putin’s Russia. 

At a time when Secretary of State Clinton was overseeing a controversial sale of North American uranium deposits to a Russian-affiliated company, her spouse Bill Clinton mysteriously received $500,000 for a single speech in Moscow. 

Renaissance Capital, a Russian bank with ties to the company, put up the cash. During the reset period, Russian-owned or affiliated companies gave several million dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

Contemporaneously, Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, received a mysterious $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina. She was supposedly the wealthiest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow who had strong ties to the Putin government. 

Biden’s Borders: The Threat to America and the Threat to the Free World by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18180/biden-borders-threat

Putin seems to understand Biden. Putin also seems to understand hollow threats and ineffective sanctions.

Putin, in addition, reduced natural gas exports to Europe by 41% last month… It appears to be a “squeeze play.” Putin would appear to be choking off natural gas supplies to Europe as a wedge, to divide the United States from NATO allies over the threatened “severe sanctions.”

The Biden administration is desperately trying to convince an unidentified audience watching somewhere that the administration is very, very serious about Ukraine’s borders. The problem is, the administration, by its actions is not very, very serious about Ukraine’s borders. If it were, it would have sent Ukraine substantial military materiel and conducted corresponding military exercises in adjoining NATO countries such as Poland and Hungary.

Engaging NATO and exercising military airlift, logistics and ground combat capabilities has always been an effective deterrent. Remember deterrence? It is not just a quaint relic of the Cold War. It is inducing an adversary to adjust its cost-benefit analysis, making the cost of creating trouble prohibitively high and ultimately not worth the effort.

To Putin, a Russian invasion of Ukraine is arguably just the next step in what appears an ongoing plan to incrementally reconstruct the former Soviet Union, or at least a large part of it. Putin began with Georgia and the Crimea; it is hard to imagine him stopping with Ukraine.

While the Biden administration blusters and postures over Ukraine’s border, the administration has an increasingly dangerous situation along America’s border.

Biden’s deputy national security advisor, Jonathan Finer, was trotted out to lecture Americans about the fundamental principle for all nations – “that our borders should be inviolate, that our sovereignty should be respected.” Oh, really? What about America’s southern border?

Here is the shocking “fact sheet” – all you need to know about just how dangerous our border situation has become.

Colossal incompetence: Biden officials completely unprepared for fall of Afghanistan, leaked memo shows By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/colossal_incompetence_biden_officials_completely_unprepared_for_fall_of_afghanistan_leaked_memo_shows.html

It’s not huge news that the Biden administration was a colossal failure on Afghanistan, or that Joe Biden still thinks there’s nothing to apologize for.

What’s news now is the colossal incompetence that went on inside that administration as Afghanistan was collapsing, according to a leaked memo that Axios got hold of:

Leaked notes from a White House Situation Room meeting the day before Kabul fell shed new light on just how unprepared the Biden administration was to evacuate Afghan nationals who’d helped the United States in its 20-year war against the Taliban.

Why it matters: Hours before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s capital on Aug. 15, 2021, senior Biden administration officials were still discussing and assigning basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation.

Outsiders were frustrated and suspicious the administration was having plenty of meetings but was stuck in bureaucratic inertia and lacked urgency until the last minute.
While the word “immediately” peppers the document, it’s clear officials were still scrambling to finalize their plans — on the afternoon of Aug. 14.
For example, they’d just decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff “to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States,” the document says.
And they were still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.

It’s nasty stuff.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Harvard Race-Discrimination Problem By Dan McLaughlin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/ketanji-brown-jacksons-harvard-race-discrimination-problem/

If Biden selects this judge, she will have to answer for her service on the board of a racially discriminatory college.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has a race-discrimination problem, and it just got a lot bigger. That problem could complicate her candidacy for the Supreme Court.

The D.C. Circuit judge is near the top of the very short list to replace Stephen Breyer; indeed, she is widely seen as the front-runner. Just as Brett Kavanaugh was once a law clerk for Anthony Kennedy and replaced him on the Supreme Court, Jackson once clerked for Breyer. A federal district-court judge since 2013, she was elevated last year to the D.C. Circuit, a court long treated by both parties as a farm team for Supreme Court picks. Former D.C. Circuit judges nominated to the Court include Kavanaugh, Merrick Garland, John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas, Douglas Ginsburg, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia. She just published her first D.C. Circuit opinion.

The firestorm over Joe Biden’s unpopular pledge to exclude everyone but African-American women from consideration for his first Supreme Court nomination has put Jackson and the other short-listers under a microscope. There are a number of concerns with her judicial record, from her record of reversals by the D.C. Circuit as a district judge to her turgid writing style.

But the timing of the nomination presents a more serious and polarizing issue: Harvard University’s policy of race discrimination against Asian students, which is currently being challenged in a lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court, in tandem with a parallel case involving the University of North Carolina. The parties to the case have just submitted a briefing schedule that would put the case over onto the fall 2022 calendar — after Breyer has left the Court. If Jackson were nominated and confirmed by October, she could potentially be in a position to hear the case.